Letter XIII

I'm writing you your birthday letter early, as I don't know how busy I
may be in the next week, nor how long this may take to reach you. You
know how much love I send you and how I would like to be with you. D'you
remember the birthday three years ago when we set the victrola going
outside your room door? Those were my high-jinks days when very many
things seemed possible. I'd rather be the person I am now than the
person I was then. Life was selfish though glorious.

Well, I've seen my first modern battlefield and am quite disillusioned
about the splendour of war. The splendour is all in the souls of the
men who creep through the squalor like vermin--it's in nothing
external. There was a chap here the other day who deserved the V.C. four
times over by running back through the Hun shell fire to bring news that
the infantry wanted more artillery support. I was observing for my
brigade in the forward station at the time. How he managed to live
through the ordeal nobody knows. But men laugh while they do these
things. It's fine.

We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!

A modern battlefield is the abomination of abominations. Imagine a vast
stretch of dead country, pitted with shell-holes as though it had been
mutilated with small-pox. There's not a leaf or a blade of grass in
sight. Every house has either been leveled or is in ruins. No bird
sings. Nothing stirs. The only live sound is at night--the scurry of
rats. You enter a kind of ditch, called a trench; it leads on to another
and another in an unjoyful maze. From the sides feet stick out, and arms
and faces--the dead of previous encounters. "One of our chaps," you say
casually, recognising him by his boots or khaki, or "Poor blighter--a
Hun!" One can afford to forget enmity in the presence of the dead. It is
horribly difficult sometimes to distinguish between the living and the
slaughtered--they both lie so silently in their little kennels in the
earthen bank. You push on--especially if you are doing observation work,
till you are past your own front line and out in No Man's Land. You have
to crouch and move warily now. Zing! A bullet from a German sniper. You
laugh and whisper, "A near one, that." My first trip to the trenches was
up to No Man's Land. I went in the early dawn and came to a Madame
Tussaud's show of the dead, frozen into immobility in the most
extraordinary attitudes. Some of them were part way out of the ground,
one hand pressed to the wound, the other pointing, the head sunken and
the hair plastered over the forehead by repeated rains. I kept on
wondering what my companions would look like had they been three weeks
dead. My imagination became ingeniously and vividly morbid. When I had
to step over them to pass, it seemed as though they must clutch at my
trench coat and ask me to help. Poor lonely people, so brave and so
anonymous in their death! Somewhere there is a woman who loved each one
of them and would give her life for my opportunity to touch the poor
clay that had been kind to her. It's like walking through the day of
resurrection to visit No Man's Land. Then the Huns see you and the
shrapnel begins to fall--you crouch like a dog and run for it.